This week, Matthew Dear is Matthew Dear. Next week, the man of many aliases may be serving up brooding anthems under his Audion moniker, or unraveling rolling minimal techno as False. But for now, he's back to just Matthew. And we can be thankful for that, because it's under his given name that he releases his most personal work.

That's not to discount the danceability of this album — the whooshing synths and syncopated drum kicks take care of that. Rather, it's with his homonymous releases that he opts to stretch his vocal cords — though stretch may be the wrong word. It's more like slather, as he croons sultry instructions that would make R. Kelly blush. The lyrical immediacy and intimacy lift Black City leagues above much of the disassociated drivel that's labeled vocal house.

Take the obvious centerpiece, "Little People (Black City)": the track kicks off at an undulating warp speed and moves onward and upward, building the lyrical fortitude on top of the bass line until eventually he's urging us to love him "like a clown." I'm not sure what that means, but with music this sexy, does it matter?

A band, a part My lingering qualms with Devendra Banhart's new album have very little to do with its substance and more to do with its consistency, a quality that throughout What Will We Be? seems present only in its glaring absence.

Various Artists | Panama! 3 If you purchase a copy of Soundway’s wonderful Panama! 3 — and you should — you get two things for the price of one. First, this is a carefully curated CD of “Calypso Panameño, Guajira Jazz & Cumbia Típica on the Isthmus 1960-75” that will keep you smiling — and perhaps dancing — for a healthy while.

Trans Am | What Day Is It Tonight? Trans Am Live, 1993 - 2008 Trans Am are distillers of guilty pleasures, mixing fat AOR riffs with sleazy electronic accents and a propulsive attitude typically reserved for arcade soundtracks. What Day Is It Tonight? covers the DC-area band’s 20-year history with high-quality, high-energy live cuts taken from their many tours.

Rihanna | Rated R Look, it’s not as if there were a song where she says, “Chris Brown, you chicken-shit motherfucker, your ass is gonna pay.”

Airman punk Perhaps the clearest sign that Afghanistan is not your father's war comes in the person of Airman First Class Peter Bourgeois, who, while deployed at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, has been busy managing the career of his former band, Jodi Explodi.

Stones arrive The Garden was the scene of a historical rock experience last Saturday when the Stones came to Boston. All the past fiascos staged in the hulking home of the Bruins and the Celtics are forgotten.

The Big Hurt: Lambert works it, 50 blows it, Moz ends it ADAM LAMBERT 's spicy AMA performance continues to dominate entertainment headlines, weeks after it first scandalized the nation — but why does America care what a man does with another man in the secluded privacy of the American Music Awards?